UAV agricultural spraying operations, with their precise, efficient, and low-cost advantages, have become one of the core technologies of smart agriculture, significantly enhancing the efficiency of crop management and reducing labor costs. The following provides a detailed analysis of application scenarios, technical configurations, industry advantages, and future trends:
Technical Application: Multi-rotor drones equipped with variable spraying systems, through GPS/RTK positioning to achieve precise prescription spraying by the plot. For example, the DJI T60 agricultural drone can be loaded with a 30L spray tank, equipped with a centrifugal nozzle, with a spraying width of up to 8 meters, and an efficiency of 150-200 mu/hour.
Scene Advantages: Compared with traditional tractor spraying, it is not limited by terrain (such as terraced fields, wetlands), avoids crushing crops, and is especially suitable for hilly areas in the south.
Data fusion: Combine satellite remote sensing data (such as NDVI vegetation index), automatically adjust the spray volume, and the amount of pesticide used can be reduced by 20%-30%.
Agricultural tree protection: Fixed-wing or multi-rotor drones use the downwash airflow to penetrate the tree canopy, achieving uniform pesticide attachment. For example, the P100 Pro drone from Xianfeng is equipped with binocular vision, which can identify the height of the trees and automatically adjust the flight altitude (2-3 meters from the tree canopy) to ensure that the leaves are treated on both sides.
Tea Garden Application: Due to the low height and dense growth of tea trees, a low-altitude (1-1.5 meters) and low-speed (3-5m/s) spraying pattern is used, along with a fan-shaped nozzle, to avoid damaging the tender buds of tea leaves. In a case study of a tea garden, the spraying efficiency of the drone reached 80 mu per hour, a 10-fold increase compared to manual spraying.
Fast response during the outbreak period: During disasters such as locust plagues and rice brown plant bugs, UAV swarms can cover thousands of mu of farmland within 24 hours. In the cotton field bollworm control in Xinjiang in 2023, a group of 100 drones had a daily operation area of up to 50,000 mu, with a pest reduction rate of over 90%.
Precise spraying: Equipped with a thermal camera to identify areas of pest and disease damage (abnormal plant temperatures), achieving "targeted treatment" and reducing the abuse of pesticides.
Leaf fertilization: UAV spraying liquid organic fertilizer, the atomization particle diameter is controlled at 100-200μm, the absorption rate is 40% higher than manual spraying.
UAV broadcasting: In combination with the integrated device for seed and fertilizer, it is possible to achieve "seeding + fertilizing" simultaneously in areas such as wasteland and beach, as demonstrated in the Inner Mongolia grassland restoration project, where the UAV broadcasting efficiency reaches 300 mu/hour, and the germination rate is 25% higher than manual broadcasting.
Efficiency Revolution: The daily working area of a single machine and operator can reach 800-1000 mu, which is 100 times that of a manual backpack sprayer and 5 times that of a tractor.
Cost reduction: The operation cost per mu is reduced by 60%-70% compared to manual spraying (manual spraying costs about 15 yuan/mu, while drone spraying costs about 5-8 yuan/mu), and there is no need to purchase large equipment such as tractors.
Safety and Environmental Protection: Operation personnel are kept away from pesticide contact, reducing the risk of poisoning by 90%; uniform atomization reduces pesticide drift, and soil pesticide residues decrease by 15%-20%.
Precise and Controllable: Error in作业 ≤2%, avoiding repeated spraying or missing spraying, especially suitable for scenarios sensitive to dosage such as herbicides.
Terain Adaptation: It can operate in areas that are inaccessible to machinery, such as mountains, steep slopes, and paddy fields, increasing the coverage by more than 30%.
Challenge: Agricultural UAV operations need to comply with the "Civil Unmanned Aircraft Operation Management Measures", and operators need to obtain the AOPA Agricultural Pest Control License.
Solution: Enterprises provide one-stop training services, and by 2024, the number of certified agricultural drone operators nationwide has exceeded 1.5 million, with some provinces offering a subsidy of 2 yuan per mu for certified operators.
Case 1: Weed Control in Northeast Cornfields
In 2024, a farm in Heilongjiang used a DJI T40 drone, equipped with a 900ml/min flow nozzle, to perform post-emergence weed control on 100,000 mu of cornfields. The operation efficiency reached 200 mu/hour, with the use of herbicides 25% less than manual application, saving 12 yuan per mu, totaling a savings of 1.2 million yuan.
Case 2: Pest and Disease Control in Yunnan Rubber Forests
A rubber group has adopted the WGS M300 RTK drone, combined with a spectrometer camera to identify areas affected by white powdery mildew, precisely spraying fungicides, reducing the cost of disease control by 40% compared to traditional methods, and reducing the incidence of rubber trees from 35% to 8%.
Market Data: According to the "2025 Global Agricultural UAV Market Report", China's agricultural UAV fleet has exceeded 500,000 units, with a working area of 150 million mu times in 2024, accounting for 60% of the total arable land area in the country, and the market size has exceeded 20 billion yuan, with a CAGR of more than 30%.
AI + Remote sensing integration: Equipped with a hyperspectral camera, it can identify the types of crop pests and diseases and the nutritional status in real time, automatically match the pesticide formula and spraying amount, and achieve full-process intelligence of "diagnosis - prescription - operation".
Unmanned farm cluster operation: Multiple drones and ground robots cooperate to synchronously collect data through the 5G network, completing the entire process of "spraying - fertilizing - harvesting" without human intervention. For example, the Country Garden Agricultural Park has achieved the cluster management of 100 drones for 5,000 mu of orchards.
Green Plant Protection Technology: Develop a low-toxicity biological pesticide spraying system, cooperate with UAV precision operation, and promote the scale development of organic agriculture; explore electrostatic spraying technology, which can increase the attachment rate of pesticides to more than 90%, further reducing the amount used.
Data Value Mining: Integration of job data with meteorological and soil data to construct crop growth models, providing value-added services such as yield prediction and water and fertilizer management for farms, like the service platform has access to more than 200 million mu of farmland data.
UAV agricultural spraying operation is upgrading from “replacing manual labor” to “smart decision-making”. With the continuous decline in technology costs (the price of mid-range models has dropped to 30,000-50,000 yuan by 2025) and policy support (such as the central government subsidizing 30% of the purchase price of machines), it will become the core infrastructure of agricultural modernization in the future.
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